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Cord-Cutting in America May Have Already Peaked (fool.com)
An anonymous reader quotes the Motley Fool:
Cord-cutting has been a massive thorn in the side of pay-TV distributors and television media companies for nearly a decade. After U.S. pay-TV subscribers peaked in 2010 at 105 million households, about 14 million homes have cut the cord, according to a report from Digital TV Research. The trend has only accelerated in recent years. 2018 saw nearly double the amount of cord-cutting over 2017, according to Leichtman Research.
But 2018 might've been the pay-TV industry's worst year for cord-cutting. The U.S. will lose fewer pay-TV subscribers this year than last, according to Digital TV Research. And the research firm suggests annual losses will continue to decline next decade.
But 2018 might've been the pay-TV industry's worst year for cord-cutting. The U.S. will lose fewer pay-TV subscribers this year than last, according to Digital TV Research. And the research firm suggests annual losses will continue to decline next decade.
"The U.S. will lose fewer pay-TV subscribers this year than last, according to Digital TV Research. And the research firm suggests annual losses will continue to decline next decade."
Right. If you have a million customers and you lose half of them one year, indeed the losses you experience the next year from the half million remaining cannot exceed the half million you already lost since you only have half a million left. I know that's vastly oversimplifying the issue, but indeed if you have a smaller pool of customers and that pool shrinks each year, statistically you're going to suffer fewer losses. Less people to cancel plus the more you lose you come closer and closer to finding your solid "base" that make up your truly loyal customers--for better or worse.
Whether this base of loyal customers is enough to keep the sinking ship from sinking faster? Well, that's yet to be seen.
The older generation may be hanging on to oldskool TV, but young people are doing the netflix/amazon/youtube thing.Watch what you want, when you want.
For most people, cutting the cord means managing multiple subscriptions to various content providers, paying much more for each piece of content than they previously were, and in addition maintaining a good broadband internet connection, likely with the same company they were attempting to 'cut the cord' from. The only way I've been able to make this even partially work is by selecting a single content provider for and only paying for a month, and then binging on their shows until I'm through everything I want to see, and then canceling and switching to the next one. The ability for choice and variety kind of goes out the window unless you are willing to pay more in the end than you ever were when you were corded.
Honestly, when pay-TV refers to the old pay-TV companies and exclude new pay-TV companies, like Netflix and Hulu, then this way to count customers is bonkers. This is like when you have one bakery in a town which sells all the bread and you count how much bread and rolls they sell. Then a new second bakery opens, but you still count only the products from the first bakery. Suddenly people by less bread. And before you tell me that Netflix is not pay-TV. It is you watch it and you pay for it. Yes it is not linear and there is no classic programming. So what? It is just the modern form of pay-TV.
The cable industry lost four quarts of blood over the last two years but next year they're only going to lose another pint.
Wooo! Pop the champagne.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Keep sucking at the teat of passive media, like a compliant, obedient citizen.
Let's not forget that the Motley Fool is the stock market equivalent of the Onion. If you use their advice for more than entertainment value, you are the fool. I guess we will know in a few more years.
My 74 year old mother just cut the cord from AT&T/DirecTV to playstation vue. No she doesn't have a playstation. anyway her cost dropped from 125/mnth to 60/mnth. That was the driver for her to switch. If the AT&Ts and Comcasts of the world keep gouging people then the exodus will continue. I guess I should follow her lead and drop DirecTV also but i haggle with them every 6 months to year to keep my price down to $64/mnth so I guess it's no rush. She was done with the haggling and just had enough. she still struggles to use the app and chromecast but she's determined stick to the man so she's getting the hang of it.
Wait till we have decent internet connections. And it would increase too if the ISPs/Cable operators didn't bribe their way into their local monopolies.
Comca$t doesn't offer internet only connections where I live BUT - I can get a cable "package" that includes internet all for $99/month (introductory) which then goes up to $million a month or something after a year.
In the meantime, AT&T is gouging me at $59/month for 1.5Mbps/.25Mbps on their shitty ratty blue and orange insulated copper. Although, their customer "service" reps will insist that I have fiber to the house. I guess the AT&T techs dropped bran cereal from the road to my house and that's what they mean.
The older generation may be hanging on to oldskool TV, but young people are doing the netflix/amazon/youtube thing.Watch what you want, when you want.
I have been "oldskool" TV free for six years now. My adult children are cableTV free too. One had it for less than a year and then cancelled. The other has never subscribed since she left home. My at home kids are now very used to no cable and I cannot imagine either would be willing to forfeit $80 per month to watch the Kardashians or whatever passes for payTV these days.
Much more cable cutting to come
100% certainty
The cable companies saw the writing on the wall and increased Internet prices to make up some of the difference.
And with all the new, separate streaming services programming has gotten fragmented and aggregators like Netflix are losing content left and right that all these companies want to keep exclusive to their own streaming services which leads to the al a carte people said they wanted, but also leads to death due to bloodloss from a thousand smaller cuts
I was out to eat the other day when I overheard a lady complaining about her cable bill approaching $200. A person at another table told her to dump her cable TV package in favor of Hulu. A person at a 3rd table recommended YouTube TV.
Cable cutting is about to become A LOT more common.
I'm not so sure about the older generation. Around here a lot of them seem to be using firesticks they bought at the flea market. They have no idea what they are or how they work, they just know they can plug them in and get TV.
Honestly I'm starting a new 2TB drive and buying movies and TV shows on DVD. Pop em on the hard drive and off I go in to no commercials TV land of my own choosing and not the cable provider who would dare send me a bill every month for TV that is mostly advertisements.
With the proliferation and fragmenting of content from streaming providers, I can't say that this surprises me.
Given that one of the drivers of "cord-cutting is the desire to save money over the (frankly) ridiculous cost of cable TV, the fact that one now has to subscribe to more and more streaming services to get content is becoming more of a downside. As each new content owner makes their own streaming service with their own content and their own subscription price, it's becoming less and less of a cost-saving measure to go streaming-only.
During 2018, hardly anyone switched from telegraph to WhatsApp.
As less people pay for traditional TV, the rate at which people abandon traditional TV is bound to decrease. There is a finite number of subscribers, after all.
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With the end of Net Neutrality (hopefully not permanently), your Xfinity cable internet service could decide that you don't get access to Disney and ESPN through streaming; your U-Verse service could decide not to let you stream Sling (owned by Dish Network) and so on.
If an of the big ISPs cut off Netflix or Amazon, there'd be riots in the street, but the smaller players may get cut out if Net Neutrality isn't restored.
Any why doesn't everyone do what I did and turn a $100 DirecTV bill (no premium channels, DVR, HD) into a $30 Sling bill (ditto)? Laziness. It's easy to keep that autobill payment on your credit card, it's hard to empty out a DVR.
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Not if you go by me and what I plan to do.
Once I get 5G in my area and a 5G phone I'm going to drop my cable broadband service like a hot potato and tether my home wifi to my phone and use my phone's data. No reason to have always on broadband when there's nobody home using it 10+ hours a day.
Ironically the cord cutting generation will still spend countless hours mindlessly consuming streamed content. They're just doing it on a different device, or paying a different provider.
Just because we call the Boob Tube a "smartphone" these days doesn't make the consumers any smarter or less addicted.
That is not at issue. The real irony is that the entrenched industry has managed to alienate their entire customer base and generally price themselves out of the market in the search for greater growth in profits. They have no idea what the true value proposition is for their own product. Growth in a mature market where most of the public is a customer can only be obtained by raising revenue through pricing per customer. They have made too many trips to the well and now the well is running dry.
Sure. Netflix and YouTube are substitutes, but cable TV is declining because their business model is failing. Cable use to be a "must have" utility that you called upon move-in just like electric or trash service. Now it's a "nobody wants." As mind share dwindles, the hive effect diminishes too.
If you talk in nummbers per year, it might be true.
Next you can look at the percentages. Also look at the amount of new subscribers, remaining subscribers and what not.
For all we know, the percentage of people leaving compared to people coming ion is rising.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I tried to watch some standup comedy on Netflix before I canceled my subscription. It was all very predictable and boring and safe. No one dares to say anything provoking any more. :D
And most of the TV shows seems awful predictable as well.
Well, there's not a shortage of things to do in the course of a day so it is not a great loss.
L'Idiot
Cutting production costs to switch to reality TV means greater profits. Until nobody is paying for it, that is.
Yeah and you pay for each service 10+ credits each month. So how many services are you using? You ain't watching what you want, unless you subsribe to each service.
Suck it, slashdot libtards.
Actually, a big part of cutting the cord (to "oldskool" cable TV) generally includes free, over-the-air, antenna-based TV (i.e. "very oldskool" TV).
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So, it's going to approach zero on pretty much the same curve we see everywhere else in nature?
This is great news for them. And the Rat party. They are still running communist retreads though...
Corporatism != Free Market
As the amount of reality shows and advertisements increases every year, even us oldschoolers are cutting cord. The Youtube is already providing idiotic reality shows and ads, why would anyone pay monthly subscriptions to see them?
we're not going to completely change the entire meaning of the language just to accomodate a religious fringe group who is weirdly obsessed with lack-of-timeshifting. The only people to whom the issue isn't completely irrelevant are sportsfans.
It's not just sports; political talk shows (such as Rachel Maddow or Sean Hannity) and entertainment industry awards shows (such as Grammys, Emmys, or Oscars) also have a short shelf life. Political talk shows last longer than sports, maybe about a day, but they too go stale.
My 79 year old mother is the only person I know that has a Cable subscription. Everyone else either has some sort of streaming. I cut the cord in 2010 after I realized Netflix pretty much replaced my DVR usage. That was the beginning of the cord cutting era, and I'm a little surprised they've only lost 16 million subscribers. As the article mentions, the real problem is lack of getting new subscribers, not as much losing old ones.
That's going to get worse as their subscriber base ages. When you're not replacing old subscribers with young ones, you're going to have a problem not with cord cutters, but with death.
Phone service also went the same way about a decade ago with cell phone service, but it was an easier transition since there's very little change in the service from landline to cell phone.
The greedy bastards raise the price every year and have it saturated with advertising, 20-30 minutes every hour concentrated in the latter half. And the few good shows end up on specialty channels that cost extra.
We cut the cord and saved $155 per month by leaving Mediacom. We switched to 24-Mbps DSL with commercial-free Hulu and Netflix. Any local shows are watched with a digital antenna, which gives a superior picture over cables compressed crappy image. Cable has turned into a huge con game.
I can either pay $30 a month for cable TV and not get my downloads capped or I can pay $30 extra to have the download cap removed.
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Most people get internet through a wire attached to their residence. Usually it's the very same coax cable that brings in cable TV, and often from the same cable company.
They're not cutting any cords. They are just switching what company is sending their feed through the cord.
(And, amusingly, people who get television by subscribing to DirectTV, which literally does NOT have a cord, but comes in over the satellite dish... are not cord-cutters.)
Likely a lot of the Genx/Millennials have already cut the cord. What you have left are Boomers sticking with their old way of doing things. Expect the downturn to continue over the next 20 years as the Boomers croak.
Cable's advantages used to be: More channels, The Shows you Want to Watch, Good signal, Movies-On Demand, Porn
Now-a-days:
- Netflix started killing "Movies On-Demand" and then Amazon and Hulu pretty much gave two more nails to the coffin.
- Pornhub provides more content than you could possibly ever want, for less than Spice/Playboy Channel, or any other "Adult" channel.
- The transition to Digital signals both led to clearer/higher quality signals in a lot of places, as well as more "sub channels" serving local/niche content
- All of the above, combined with Hulu/Netflix showing seasons of shows where ever you want them (at a time when less and less people are watching on a TV), along with producing good original content which is catering to younger generations
means that on the whole, there just is very little that "Cable TV" does better than a Streaming service.
HBO recognizes this completely, and is attempting to cut the cord also with their direct "HBO Now" subscription service (available as an add-on also for Amazon & Hulu).
Disney is trying to launch its own "Streaming Channel", and I expect it will follow the same path as HBO's.
The cable companies had the opportunity to get ahead of this and produce a better service, but insisted only on trying to wring out the most profit they could from their customers. The result left an opportunity for a disruptive new player in the disruptive new phase of the industry and customers who felt no love for their existing service and happy to ditch them given a choice.
did you try an amplified antenna?
Subscribe to a different service each month. Most Internet VOD services haven't given deep annual discounts yet.
Any why doesn't everyone do what I did and turn a $100 DirecTV bill (no premium channels, DVR, HD) into a $30 Sling bill (ditto)?
My roommate watches Washington Journal, C-SPAN's call-in morning show. Sling Blue + News Extra doesn't offer C-SPAN.
Eventually: internet will cost $80 a month and internet + cable bundle will cost $90 a month.
Reality shows are killing cable for a lot of us. That, plus channel drift. Almost none of the cable channels are showing the kind of content they originally did. Try to find a history show on History, or a gardening show on HGTV, or anything other than law enforcement shows on A&E. It's all reality shows now!
I'm tired of pawn shops, aliens, antiques, metal-working, hot rods, criminals, and real estate shows.
Although I think television consumption might be going down in general (maybe with an uptick for online stuff like youtube). Because once you get over that first hurdle and cut the cord to cable then it's a much easier hurdle to cut back on hours-per-week of television viewing.
Comcast charges you a "Broadcast Fee" for TV even if you don't want it!
https://www.tablotv.com/blog/pay-tv-companies-are-trying-trick-cord-cutters/
Reality shows are killing cable for a lot of us. That, plus channel drift.
I think the drift was caused by the reality show, and as another poster pointed out, the cost for reality TV is less than for "scripted" TV. So of course all the studios went for the cheapest which also panders to the lowest.
Philo T. already had a dim view of his invention by 1969, but if he saw what's become of it, he'd die all over again.
Internet's headed the same way, I"m afraid. The old forum "one guy says, the rest parrots" is well and alive and now a thousand-headed Medusa with Facetwit and Instadumb.
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
All the 'negative' coverage in mainstream news about cord-cutting the last few months? Even NPR has had a couple of articles. Seems that slamming cord-cutting has become all-the-rage. We cut (6) years ago, and the only thing missed is breaking news and perhaps the winter Olympics. Netflix and a Roku and we're good to go. True our internet feed comes from Spectrum but they're sole provider in this area.